News for Speakers’ Corner, Sunday 15th October.

“Intuition: an uncanny second sense that tells people they are right whether they are nor not.”
Anon.

1. What a day! Helmut, Ray, Mr B and Mirko were at their vigorous best but the bad bit was: Steve Maxwell wasn’t there. He had other plans.

The best bit: we had three new speakers!

One was John August, Radio Skid Row star Tues noon til 2pm, and Pirate Party representative. This scribe was busy listening to the other speakers, so I can’t tell you what what John talked about. But it would have been topical and in no way eldritch.

John August taking a break.

2. Andrew was also from the Pirate Party and he spoke about intellectual property rights, colour blindness and its treatments, power generation for Australian cities, and same-sex marriage. There was nothing eldritch about Andrew, either.

Andrew, from The Pirate Party.

3. Danny is a Christian healer. Or, more accurately, The Lord uses Danny to heal people. Danny bravely came to help The Lord heal passers-by. This scribe does not know how industrious or successful the pair turned out to be, but both are welcome back again.
Danny is as far from eldritch that you can get.

If Danny does come again we’ll have someone check on The Lord’s efficacy. If people are healed we want to know about it. If The Lord can heal a few people at Speakers’ Corner it will give the place a big boost.

4. Kate spoke about the dangers of artificial intelligence with regards to the stock market. The crowd quickly grew! Kate then explained why she is reluctant to have her photograph displayed on social media sites. But instead of sounding like a paranoid fuddy-duddy, she sounded sensible. One grasshopper called her ‘brilliant’.

This is the closest we could get to taking a photo of Kate. It is, nevertheless, an uncanny likeness.

Kate did an excellent job and answered many questions. The word ‘eldritch’ does not apply to her, and she is welcome back any time.

5. The ‘Something Nice’ segment, to charm some and irritate others.

6. “I’ve always said that my job as a father is more important than my job as a senator.”

They were the brazen, selfish words of Greens Senator Scott Ludlum this week. Said Mr B.

CORRECTION: Thanks to alert reader, Mr Bill Browne (AKA William George), we now know that the words were spoken by Liberal National Senator Matt Canavan. Mr B got it wrong!
The vexed Mr B criticised the senator, and criticised the reporter for not reprimanding him when she had the chance.

Yes, but it would have been nice if he had criticised the right senator!

7. Christians say that Jesus will soon return to Earth. The eldritch Mr B examined what would happen if Jesus did return. Would Jesus be obliged to use the current media platforms like CNN to spread his message? Would there be queues of people miles and kilometres long waiting to be healed, and if so, how would Jeus deal with them all? With all of his press commitments, would Jesus have to ignore the suffering of many? Would he be resented for it? Could he heal en-masse? And, people would still have to get up each morning and go to work, so would Jesus soon become yesterday’s news?

Or what?

(Albert claimed that the media moguls would villify Jesus. Does Albert have a point?)

Mr B also gave his reasons why God and Jesus, if they did exist, would be no better than we humans or a blind mole.

8. The spirit of the law or the letter of the law?Seven politicians with dubious dual citizenships will soon have their dubious political careers determined by the High Court. Mr B is curious to discover if the High Court will make its decisions based on commonsense, or based on the letter of the law.

He claims that it’s obvious that the seven politicians are not foreign spies infiltrating Australian politics, and commonsense should prevail.

And, will Mathias Cormann, who is obviously a Belgian spy, get away with it just because he relinquished his Belgian citizenship?

9. The word ‘reform’ has become a weasil word. The ABC news claimed that with the Sydney City Council’s approval, retailers might soon be allowed to introduce reforms allowing them to open from 7am to 10pm every night.

Get that? REFORMS’!

Mr B was furious. He wasn’t foaming at the mouth, but he was close. He said that a ‘reform’ is supposed to be an improvement, not a backward step towards Third World practices. In Second and Third world countries shops are open day and night, seven days a week. Should we be eager to join them?

A robust discussion ensued, with Mr B battling supporters of the plan.

Apparently, the Sydney City Council wants to bring “life back to Sydney”. Mr B reckons that life isn’t and shouldn’t be about drinking and shopping. He listed a string of things that life IS about. For once, this scribe agreed with him.

10.What is 1% of infinity? And, if Bluey slept in a blue room for an infinite period of time, and violet slept in a violet room for an infinite period of time, but every Christmas Day they swapped rooms for the day, who would spend more time in the blue room?

(Answer: they’d spend the same amount of time in the blue room. The scenario was posed by A.W. Moore.)
11. Other subjects discussed:– Albert explained how banks create money, and then explained why they are evil. He says banks have ‘enslaved us all’.
Mind you, Albert didn’t look enslaved. He looked quite comfortable.

– Mr B was criticised for calling one or two of his grasshoppers ‘imbeciles’. “You don’t need to insult people,” he was told.
Mr B deftly defended himself, explaining that it’s not his fault they’re imbeciles.

– An Australian couple were forced to fly their child to the U.S. to have a heart operation. It cost $150,000. The speaker discussed why an operation would cost that much. He then explored the awful dilemma some specialist doctors are in. (No, there was no sarcasm.)

– One of the JokeFest jokes:
Bill and Ben are walking along a footpath. Bill finds a pay-packet with $400 in it.
His mate Ben says, “You’re lucky!”
Bill says, “Waddaya mean lucky? Look at the tax I’m paying!”

– We discussed Edward De Bono’s ‘Intelligence Trap’. That’s the idea that many intelligent people aren’t good thinkers. They might be adept at articulating their thoughts, but that doesn’t mean their thoughts are well conceived. They have set a trap for themselves: they are so good at stating their case and cherrypicking examples to support their case, and are so concerned about their status as an intelligent person, that they can miss the opportunity to see the times when they are wrong. They’d rather dig a deeper hole than go elsewhere.
(It was pointed out that Mr B is safe from the intelligence trap. He has nothing to fear.)

– A fortnight ago Mr B was asked why so many refugees destroy their documents before they come by boat to Australia. “They’re just economic refugees,” the grasshopper claimed, “trying to fool the authorities.”
Today Mr B gave six reasons why many refugees arrive without documents, and why we also might arrive in a foreign land without documents if we were refugees.

– We heard an anecdote about a woman who jumped into a river to save her struggling child. After dragging her son to the river bank, and then sitting back in her deck-chair, it was pointed out to her that she still had her cigarette in her mouth!

– Mr B wanted to know why texting, emailing and tweeting are so popular. One grasshopper (Andrew from the Pirate Party) gave him a satisfactory answer abut the addictive hits of dopamine.

12. If you haven’t already examined our Facebook page you probably have a good reason for not doing so. If that’s the case, keep avoiding it.